


Bow Ties

by Happy9450



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M, June Newsroom Fanfic Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4181205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happy9450/pseuds/Happy9450
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nancy gives Will some things from Charlie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bow Ties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacmermaid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacmermaid/gifts).



September 23, 2013

Will McAvoy sat at his desk trying to write some copy and outline an interview with a former State Department official about the dangerous combustion of religious and political extremism, keying off of the news wire that two Taliban sympathizers had blown up themselves, and, by the initial count, more than eighty other people in a Christain church in Pakistan. All Saints Church was, or had been, a beautiful hundred-twenty-year-old Ottoman-style edifice in Peshawar. Now whatever peace had resided there that was shattered by intolerance and fanaticism. 

She appeared in his doorway without warning. The face he most wanted to see . . . always wanted to see. But his grin soon deteriorated as the look of pain and remembered terror in her eyes began to penetrate. MacKenzie McHale, his boss and his wife, entered his office, and leaned up against the glass partition that formed the wall between Will and the bull pen.

“I prayed in that church,” she whispered a split second before he found his voice. No need to ask which church, but she said it anyway. “The church that was bombed with all of those people . . . .” Will glanced at the words written on the yellow ruled foolscap on which he’d always hand-written first drafts ever since his White House days. (Mac scoffed at his protestations that it was absolutely not a superstitious ritual.) The story from Pakistan had just gotten personal, very personal.

"Peshawar,” he said softly, a statement not a question. She nodded, and cast her eyes downward. Was this a “Jim Moment,” Will wondered, when it would be best to minimize physical contact. Sometimes she seemed so delicate . . . so fragile . . . he feared that if he touched her, she would disintegrate under his hands. He hadn't moved from behind his desk, and it suddenly hit him that in the years since she'd come to ACN, he'd had thousands of hours of practice fighting the urge to race across a room and take MacKenzie McHale into his arms. But unlike those other times, now, he stood slowly, and walked to her.

She filled the silence first, causing him to stop a foot or so away. “I prayed in that church in June . . . on June 7th . . . 2009 . . . and now it's gone.” That was an overstatement, but Will wasn't parsing facts. “I sat outside . . . afterwards . . . against the wall . . . a wall that’s probably no more . . . and tried to call you. It didn't go through. Couldn't even leave one of my famous messages.” She tried to smile. “Good thing too.” She paused and looked at him ruefully. “Would have been a crappy way to have learned about it all.” He closed his eyes. He didn't want to break contact, but he was overwhelmed by the intensity of the pain that resided just behind her words. “Then, I tried . . . Danny. His phone had been changed.” 

And, a few weeks later, you were stabbed, Will’s mind added silently, as he looked into her eyes once again.

He reached for her, and as she had done when he'd hugged her in front of the entire staff that first Valentine's Day, she tensed for an instant and then folded herself against him. He stroked her dark silky hair, and thought about the “Rudy Hug,” as Sloan had named it. In that moment, he'd reacted instinctively and honestly to the awareness that the fact that his staff had lined up to “lay down their jerseys” was a demonstration of how fucking much this woman loved him. If only he'd allowed it to last . . . to be the beginning. If only he'd allowed Billy to stay in control . . . it wouldn't have changed Kabul or Islamabad, but at least there would have been no Nina, and Mac would have been spared that terrible hurt. If only he'd kept the comfort and vulnerability that he’d felt . . . always felt . . . when her body was pressed against his from frightening him so. He could have let himself begin to live again . . . made that moment the beginning of this life, the one she'd tried to give him from the first day she walked into the News Night bull pen. This life was a gift from Charlie . . . a gift from Mac . . . the last two people to believe that Billy was still alive and could be reached. 

"What did you pray for, Kenz?" Even as he whispered it, he thought it might be the wrong question. Now, it hung in the air.

“Peace,” she said at last. “I prayed for peace.” She looked down between them, and moved her left hand to cover the rise of her belly, the part of her body that Mac now thought of as belonging to Charlotte. It was late September and she had stopped counting the weeks. She knew that it was twenty-three or twenty-four. She knew what Charlotte looked like now . . . exactly what she would look like. The thought made Mac involuntarily shudder. Will tightened his hold on his wife and child.

“I couldn't imagine . . . “ she began, after they'd just held each other silently for a long while. “. . . it seemed . . . presumptuous . . . back then . . . to pray for . . . any of this.” The four carats of diamond solitaire on her finger briefly caught the light as she caressed his cheek, his chest, and then, their baby. “I love you so much, Billy. Thank you. Thank you for being here through all of this. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for Charlotte. Thank you for everything.”

Sweet Jesus! She was thanking him. He kissed her lips and her hair, moaned and felt himself shatter.

 

“Hi, Will.” Two hours later and another striking brunette filled his doorway. 

By this time, Will McAvoy was on a roll. Fueled by Mac’s pain at the bombing, he knew what he wanted to say and was writing furiously about the evils of combining politics and religion, citing to numerous instances – the Middle East, Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe where this intoxicating mixture produced chaos, bloodshed and devastation. “The founders of this country knew what they were doing,” he wrote, “when they decreed that there should be no melding of governance and religion. We do not need to test our political candidates according to their religious beliefs, or lack thereof. We do not need to be ‘a Christain nation.’ We need to be a moral nation, a just nation and an ethical nation . . . .”

“Nancy! This is a pleasant surprise.”

“May I come in?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. God! Sorry. My mind’s in the Middle East. I apologize. I'd like nothing better than for you to come in.” 

Charlie Skinner’s widow entered Will’s office, walked over to his visitors’ chairs, and put down the heavy-looking shopping bag that she was carrying. 

"Good. Me too.” She smiled, looked genuinely . . . not happy, but . . . content. Will marveled once again at the depth of her resiliency. “I have some things of Charlie’s that I would like you to have.”

“God . . . Nancy . . . I . . . “ Will stammered before finally settling on, “thank you.”

“Okay,” she smiled. “First, there’s this.” She handed him a dark colored box with the Robert Talbot logo on the top. 

He opened it and found three identical bow ties. Two seemed exactly the same and the third was smaller . . . a child’s tie? Before he could ask, Nancy Skinner spoke again.

"Charlie bought them for Beau, Ned and himself. He thought . . . we could go someplace special, you know, and they could all dress up, and the boys would get a kick out of it, but he . . . “ Her voice faltered, and she finished the thought with her eyes. Will looked back down at the three ties rolled carefully in the box. “I don't know . . . maybe it's not a good idea . . . “ Nancy suddenly seemed flustered. “But I thought that you . . . might . . . you and the boys . . . might wear them . . . at the unveiling of Charlie’s headstone. But please, please don't fell pressured or obligated,” she added hastily.

“Obligated? Pressured? God, Nancy . . . I'd be honored . . . beyond honored.” He came around the desk and embraced her. “Have you brought it up with Beau or Ned?” He knew the answer as soon as he'd asked.

“No. I wanted to be sure that you would be comfortable and willing to do it before getting them involved. I will though . . . .”

“No. Let me, okay? I'll do it at the game on Saturday. They know they can be honest with me.”

Nancy wiped her eyes with the tissue Will handed her. “Okay,” she said, smiling up at him. “You know, I think you just gave the best description for a great father that I've ever heard.” Will looked at her quizzically, clearly unaware of what he'd said to provoke this observation. Nancy raised a hand to his cheek. “That the boys know they can be honest with you,” she said in reply to his unasked question. “And, they do. I absolutely agree. Think about all of the dimensions of the parent child relationship . . . any relationship for that matter . . . that must be strong and aligned properly for that simple statement to be true.”

Will did. It certainly wasn't true of his relationship with his father. Honesty never had a chance in that one . . . not from day one until the moment that John McAvoy died without ever speaking to his eldest son. It wasn't really true of his mother, whose life had been built on lies. That thought had crept in unbidden and was forcibly banished, as he replaced all thoughts of his parents with images of Mac and Charlie. They were the people with whom he knew he could always be honest. 

Nancy kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You’re going to be the best father, Will. Really, you already are.” Will couldn't trust himself to respond. If fact, he wasn't sure if he could talk at all over the lump in his throat.

“On to item number two,” she said, setting a medium-sized, oblong box on his desk, and gesturing for him to open it. Inside was a leather case and inside of that, cradled in a thick velvet lining, was a bottle of Scotch whiskey. Thirty-eight-year-old Scotch whiskey, with a hand-lettered label. 

Will gaped, open-mouthed. He recognized the label. The Scotch was from a small private distillery owned by a Scottish Peer who was a school chum of Ted McHale’s from Harrow, and who, Will believed his father-in-law had said, was also in the diplomatic service. Will had drunk this Scotch on three occasions in his life, on his first visit to “the country house” with MacKenzie in 2006, again in England last New Year’s Eve, and at his home in New York, before his formal Wedding Reception a few months previously. He also owned a fifty-year-old bottle of the same Scotch, a wedding gift from his father-in-law, that had come with instructions that the priceless amber liquid was to be saved to toast the births and marriages of his children and grandchildren.

“What? How? Where did Charlie get . . . ?”

“There’s a note . . . under the bottle,” Nancy replied.

Will lifted the bottle gingerly from its case, set it down on his desk and removed and unfolded the note. It was handwritten on fine linen stationary bearing the Ailesbury crest, and dated 8 November 2012, two days after he'd asked MacKenzie to marry him. Will looked up. “You’ve read it?” he asked. Nancy nodded, smiling. Will read:

“My dear Charlie,

“Yes, this is a bottle of Scotch Whiskey. No, I've not been struck on the head or suffered a stroke, so I'm fully cognizant of the fact that I'm sending this very expensive Scotch to a confirmed and devout Bourbon man. However, it's a special bottle, distilled in extremely small quantities by a dear school friend of mine, whom I shall sorely miss for the rest of my days. He also served as a diplomat for Her Majesty’s government, and during that time, began a tradition of bestowing a bottle of his Scotch on those of our colleagues who distinguished themselves with exemplary service and/or a spectacular bit of bloody good luck. I'm not sure which pertains to the current situation, possibly both. Either way, my good man, you more than deserve this. 

“As you may have guessed, Maggie and I got a Skype call yesterday afternoon from Mackie and William, who, as I believe you are also aware, apparently intend to be married this Summer. I'm at a loss for words to describe how happy they seemed, and how connected they appeared, connected fundamentally, almost cellularly. Both looked ecstatic and exhausted, and, from the number of times my daughter (who is more like her mother than either would care to admit) broke out in fits of giggles, I can well imagine the sort of night they had.

“Charlie, you were right about everything. For those two, there was no moving on, and failure in your little experiment in human relations was not an option. You were right about offering Mackie the job. You were right that she needed to be Will’s EP again every bit as much as he needed her there. You were right that the best way to repair their lives was by building up trust again doing the news together the way they had done years ago. Now, because of you, they have each found their way home. 

“While I'd hoped that your faith in this endeavor would be rewarded, frankly, I must confess that there were many, many times that I never again expected to see Mackie look as happy as she did yesterday. I sincerely apologize for my outburst the last time we spoke. In my defense, I can only say that at the time, things seemed to have suddenly gone downhill with Will, or at least that’s what we supposed since Mackie had begun to withdraw from us again. The last time that happened, as you know, was extraordinarily painful, especially for her mother. It lasted for almost two years and ended in a hospital hallway in Germany with a doctor telling me that he did not expect my child to survive. But despite the things I said, I want you to know that deep down, I trusted your judgment when you maintained that rough times or not, Mackie and Will were better off near each other than apart. And, I never doubted that you would honor your pledge to step in if need be, and not allow MacKenzie to be harmed. 

So, to end where I began, please accept this token of my esteem and gratitude. See you at the wedding, if not before.

All our best,

Ted”

Will finished reading and looked over at Nancy. “Charlie never mentioned that he knew Mac’s father.”

"I'm not sure exactly when they first talked. I think that Charlie called Mac’s father in Germany when he found out about the stabbing . . . but I'm not sure about that,” she added hastily when she saw Will’s shocked expression. “I know that Ted McHale called Charlie right before Mac came up here to start as your EP. He . . . Mac’s father . . . was worried. Actually,” she chuckled, “I believe that he thought that Charlie had lost his ever-lovin’ mind hiring Mac as your EP behind your back.”

“Well, that made two of us.” Will shook his head as if to clear it. “Germany? Charlie knew Mac was in the hospital in Germany? When she was stabbed? How did he know about that? Everyone . . . CNN . . . hushed it up. Kept it under wraps more than I would have thought possible, in fact.”

Rather than get deeper into the topic, Nancy Skinner changed the subject, using a technique that she had perfected over many years. If you want to divert a newsman, she had discovered, ask him about the news. “You’re writing about the Middle East?” Nancy asked, glancing at the tablet on Will’s desk. Will looked down at the words he had written before she came in. “Oh, yes, the church bombing in Pakistan,” she continued before he could tell her. “I saw it on the Internet, on the train on the way into town . . . seems like the death toll is rising . . . .”

Will made a few mouse clicks on his desktop computer. “Yeah, the latest count is over one hundred.” He sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Mac was there, you know, in Peshawar. She told me that she'd prayed in All Saints Church in 2009, on the anniversary . . .” He paused as if trying to order his thoughts. “. . . of the death of someone she'd . . . loved very much.” 

Nancy looked at him sympathetically. “How is Mac these days?” 

“Actually, she's been back over there a lot . . . Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan . . . telling me about stuff that happened. They are hard memories. She has nightmares about . . . things that happened . . . .” He sighed, and then smiled. “But she's happy. We’re happy. She likes being President of ACN, when she's not bitching about it or Pruitt.” Nancy loved the light that came into Will’s eyes and the softness that crept into his voice when he spoke about MacKenzie. “The baby’s fine. All the tests say she's healthy. It's a girl. We’re naming her Charlotte . . . for Charlie,” Will added softly. He hadn't really meant to say that. He and Mac had decided not to tell anyone yet, and he hoped that Mac wouldn't mind.

Nancy smiled sadly and sighed. Will could see her eyes sparkle with tears and felt his own sting. “Oh, Will! That's so . . . I don't know what to say. He'd have loved having a little namesake running around, especially a child from you and MacKenzie.” She smiled more fully and with the mischievous twinkle that he always saw when she was happy. “I think Charlie might have been higher than you were when he got home on Election Night. I know some of it was the amount of champagne Lee had brought in, but I couldn't get him to stop singing. He loved you both deeply. But you know that.”

The thought of Charlie singing made Will grin. He would always remember the look on Charlie’s face when Mac launched herself into his arms as the bull pen erupted after his announcement of their engagement. He almost said how much he longed to see Charlie, to have one more conversation with him, but then thought that maybe it wasn't the thing to say to the person who must miss Charlie more than anyone else.

“So,” Nancy began again after a moment of silence had passed, “speaking of Mac’s time in the Middle East, I also have this for you.” She removed from the bag, a medium-sized grey plastic box with a USB cord trailing from it. 

“What’s that?”

“A 500 gigabyte hard drive, I believe, with a complete library of everything Mac did at CNN, from your show to raw and edited footage of her work in Iraq and Pakistan.”

Will looked dumbfounded. “Where . . . ?”

“Charlie put it together. He started taping . . . “ she paused and laughed at herself. “Taping . . . Well, that really dates me, doesn't it?” 

“Me too, I guess, ‘cause I didn't notice anything odd about it. Don't people still tape things?” he asked smiling.

“Can you even buy recording tape anymore?” She shook her head. “Anyway, Charlie started recording and keeping your “This Day in Washington” broadcasts when Mac took over as EP and it got so good.” Nancy smiled at Will. “He was extremely proud of what you were doing, even if it was for his biggest competitor. He was so happy when you fell in love. Then, after . . . when you came back to ACN, Charlie became a bit obsessed with figuring out what had happened to you and MacKenzie. He went to D.C. to find her after you confessed that she'd been trying to get in touch with you . . . but she was gone.

“You were so miserable . . . and it never seemed to get any better . . . he began to worry that if she didn't come back . . . I mean, if something happened to her over there . . . you’d just . . . .” She finished the thought with a shrug. “So, he started following her on CNN and the Internet . . . I think Leona got some of this stuff for him . . . the raw footage . . . directly from Ted . . . Turner, not McHale,” she added when he’d looked at her quizzically. 

Will nodded. Everyone knew that Ted Turner had a thing for Leona. While Nancy had been talking, Will had attached the drive’s USB cable to his computer and opened the directory. Unable to stop himself, he launched the video clip dated September 23, 2007, six years ago to the day, and one of the earliest dates on the drive. September, he thought, she must have just arrived in Iraq . . . three and a half months after William’s birth. It was clearly raw footage. The camera swung erratically as it framed up the shot. But there she was.

Will stared at McKenzie’s face. Young and . . . oh, so beautiful . . . but thin, vacant, hollowed out, traumatized. Someone . . . a disembodied voice . . . the cameraman, he supposed . . . was talking to her, but it wasn't registering. She was gone, he knew. She'd gone back into the horror and the blood. Then, he saw a blur move into and out of the frame and heard a voice he recognized call her, “Ms. McHale.” It was Jim. Jim used to call her, Ms. McHale. It almost made him smile. But what he was watching didn't make him smile. After she failed to respond, Jim switched to saying, “MacKenzie,” and then, “Mac” several times each. Finally, he came fully into the frame, a look of such concern and caring on his impossibly boyishly young face that Will felt his throat tighten. Jim reached up as if he were going to touch her shoulder, but before he could make contact, she startled violently and blinked at him as though she were having trouble focusing her eyes. There was a sheen on her face that despite that he knew she was standing in what must have been killer heat looked unnatural. The thought crossed Will’s mind that possibly she was on high dosage antidepressants.

“Yes, what? Uh, excuse me. I'm sorry,” he heard her say to Jim, and then repeat again and again, to Jim, to the air, to the unseen camera operator. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Those words! He'd heard them said like that a thousand times . . . in his office the afternoon he'd told her that he intended to banish her from ACN . . . from his life . . . the first day on which it would be acceptable to his PR image . . . again in that room two years later after she'd fired Jerry Dantana . . . in hundreds of voice messages . . . and in his arms, in his . . . their . . . bed as he tried to awaken her from a dream.

Oh, Christ! Emotions swamped him. He closed his eyes as he'd done all of his life when pain approached. He felt his lower lip begin to tremble and he bit into it savagely until he tasted blood.

“What happened to her, Will?” 

Nancy Skinner’s voice was quiet. The question was incredibly respectful, loving and compassionate. He opened his eyes to find Nancy’s locked on the screen where Mac was doing a sound check. Then, slowly, she turned to look at him.

“I . . . I . . . .” He swallowed hard to steady himself. “I can't . . . .” He shook his head, and she nodded. “It's not what Charlie thought,” Will blurted out, as Nancy opened her mouth to speak. “She wasn't raped.” At least not by a stranger, he added silently. No, she was savaged and brutalized by the man she loved, the one person she should have been able to trust. Will pushed the thoughts out of his mind.

“Then, you know what happened . . . she's told you. That's good. That’s all that matters. I don't need to know. Charlie was worried that she'd hold it all in indefinitely, and never start to really heal. He tried once to get her to talk about it . . . during the time you were with Nina, I think.” If Nancy noticed the pain that crossed his face at the mention of Nina Howard, she didn't let on. She gestured to the computer screen. “He told her that he'd seen video of her early in her time in Iraq and knew PTSD when he saw it.” Nancy smiled in a way that Will associated with thoughts of Charlie. “He told me that all she would say was that she'd developed insomnia and found it difficult to care for herself properly after you left Washington, and that those old clips had been shot when she was at her worst.”

He shook his head sadly. “Leave it to Mac to find some way to tell the truth.” He made a noise that was part sigh, part snort and part moan. “I'm not sure she's capable of lying . . . or cheating.” That did register on Nancy’s face. “We’re trying . . . she's seeing Habib. She's getting close . . . I think . . . to being able to talk about it, but . . . .” He looked imploringly into her eyes. “I do my best . . . but I wish I knew how to help her.” He covered his face with his hands, and scrubbed them through his hair. “I'm so lost without Charlie,” he wailed in anguish.

“No. You’re not,” Nancy Skinner contradicted him. “You’re not lost because Charlie did his job as a father and left you . . . left you all . . . well prepared for life. You know exactly how to be kind and compassionate, how to listen and allow the other person to speak the truth, even hard truths you don't want to hear. You know exactly what MacKenzie needs. I've seen you with her. You know what she needs every minute of every day.”

“That's what Charlie would say.”

“Yes,” she smiled. “It is.”

 

Six Months Later

MacKenzie McHale glanced surreptitiously at the screen of her smartphone. No messages. Of course there were no messages. Everything was fine, perfectly fine. She returned it to her purse, vowing not to pull it out again until the luncheon was over. She looked up and caught Nancy Skinner smiling conspiratorially at her from across the large white-clothed table. Busted. 

God, Mac thought. She'd promised herself not to be one of those mothers who cannot stand to be separated from her baby for even a few hours. True, she was farther away . . . at least a 20 minute taxi ride from three month old Charlotte . . . than she had ever been before, and she had been gone longer . . . according to Mac’s watch, it had already been four hours . . . but still checking her phone for texts or missed calls every few minutes was nuts. Charlotte was in the expert care of Holly McIntire, the British ex-patriot nanny whom Mac had picked and Leona had hired to open the AWM Day Care Center. Charlotte was comfortable with Holly and was already spending several hours every day in the Center so Mummy, Daddy and Grandma Lee could get some work done. At this time of day, Charlie was probably asleep and when she woke up, Holly had enough frozen breast milk “to keep Charlie going for days,” as Will had reassured her that morning. Mac felt her breasts start to ache, which reminded her that she needed to think about something besides Charlotte before her nipples leaked through the pads and onto her dress. 

Just then, the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel erupted around her into thunderous applause and the scraping of chair legs as the crowd came to its feet. Will McAvoy walked out onto the dais for the second time that day. The first had been to accept a Peabody Award for News Night’s coverage of the September 2013 terrorist attack on the All Saints’ Church in Peshawar. This time, he stood beneath a large screen on which was displayed Charlie Skinner’s grinning face. Still prison-trim, Will wore a charcoal grey suit, white shirt, and uncharacteristically, a brightly colored bow tie. Mac glanced over at the identically clad “man” who had been seated next to her. Charlie’s sixteen-year-old grandson, Beau, reached down and adjusted the smaller version of the same tie that was around the neck of his “six-and-three quarters”-year-old brother, Ned. When Bo straightened up, their eyes met, and Mac impulsively leaned over and gave him a quick hug. 

“Thank you. Thank you,” Will was saying, gesturing for the room to be seated. “All of us,” he continued, “Charlie’s journalistic family and his biological family, thank you for that ovation from the bottoms of our hearts.”

Will continued his introduction of a short video tribute to Charlie Skinner’s life and career that Neal and the News Night control room had put together, with more than a little assistance from Nancy and Leona. Will, who was scheduled to speak both before and after it was shown, had watched it over and over until he could get through it without breaking down. Mac’s heart swelled with pride at the sight of him standing up there in the tie that he and “the boys” wore on special occasions, talking from his heart about the man “who taught me to be a journalist, a friend, a husband and a father.”

Mac looked around the table at Charlie’s family. There was Nancy across from her, to Nancy’s right was Will’s empty chair, then Leona, Don and Sloan, Sophie Skinner, Reese, Jim and Maggie, Katy Skinner, Ned and Bo. Like Will and the boys, Don, Jim and Reese were also wearing one of Charlie’s bow ties. 

“We’re here, Charlie,” Mac whispered as the lights dimmed. “We’re all here because of you.”


End file.
